Mobile and social are fueling massive digital-video advertising growth as dollars shift away from display ads

BI Intelligence Video is emerging as one of the top digital advertising formats on desktop and mobile. Mobile will be the biggest driver of digital-video ad spend over the next few years. Mobile video ad revenue will grow more than 3x faster than desktop through 2020.

Digital video is gaining traction quickly on social-media sites. Facebook was an early backer of the format with the introduction of autoplay video ads in 2013, but recently other social networks, including Twitter, have launched digital-video ad units.

In this in-depth report from BI Intelligence, we find that US digital-video advertising revenue from PC- and mobile-based video ads will top nearly $5 billion this year, and grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.9%. Total revenue will reach $13.3 billion by year-end 2020, according to BI Intelligence estimates based on historical data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Video ads perform better than standard display ad units. In-stream video ads, including ads that play at the start, during, and after video content, yielded click-through rates (CTRs) that were 18x higher than HTML5 banner ad units in February 2015, according to Google's Rich Media Gallery.